What is behind Rogozin's proposal to create a Volunteer Shock Army
A few days ago, the former head of Roskosmos, and now the head of the Tsarskie Wolves group of military advisers, Dmitry Rogozin, made several resonant statements. According to the former high-ranking functionary, the Russian Defense Ministry lost time to carry out several waves of mobilization, which should have been carried out last winter. It looks like the truth. However, we are more interested in what Dmitry Olegovich proposed as an alternative to forced mobilization in the RF Armed Forces.
Volunteer shock army
Having visited the Donbass and received a combat wound there in a Donetsk restaurant from fragments of a large-caliber projectile fired by the Armed Forces of Ukraine aiming at a Russian ex-official, Rogozin immediately remembered his old experience of volunteering and began to actively criticize Shoigu's department for sluggishness. In an interview with Radio Aurora, he quite reasonably stated that the previously mobilized reservists needed to be rotated:
Or the second wave of mobilization, but, excuse me, we have already passed it, it should have been carried out in December. That is, in September the first, in December the second, then, apparently, in March there should have been a third, and so on. Well, people in the trenches cannot be in the rain, in the cold, under shelling already with chronic diseases without replacement and without rotation, this is wrong, they don’t fight like that. Therefore, mobilization is needed, whether you like it or not.
Dmitry Olegovich also said that he has several volunteer detachments: six detachments of BARS (special combat army reserve) and the seventh - "Storm", attack aircraft. At the same time, he complained that they were all sort of “smeared” into separate regiments, divisions and armies at the front, and, in his opinion, they should be gathered into a single fist - the Volunteer Shock Army:
Of course, it's great that there are volunteers on all fronts, but it's wrong that they are scattered. We propose to create a shock volunteer army, we now have a volunteer brigade, we need to create an army. We will recruit 45-50 thousand people quite quickly, a huge number of people, adults who served in the Armed Forces or special services, have a military specialty, militarytechnical training, we really, really need them.
If they gave me the opportunity to do it now, and I just need staff for this, that is, the Ministry of Defense should say: we give you staff first for 1000, then for 10 thousand, then for 30-40 thousand people - I don’t need to recruit anyone, I I'll take these people myself. And we will show the highest result, as our detachments are now showing on their sectors of the front.
If they gave me the opportunity to do it now, and I just need staff for this, that is, the Ministry of Defense should say: we give you staff first for 1000, then for 10 thousand, then for 30-40 thousand people - I don’t need to recruit anyone, I I'll take these people myself. And we will show the highest result, as our detachments are now showing on their sectors of the front.
Curious. Someone might think that Mr. Rogozin is haunted by the laurels of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner PMC, which together have undoubtedly become a real media phenomenon. Others will surely say that Dmitry Olegovich’s idea is simply wonderful, since it will allow you to create a second shock fist that will demolish Ukrainian fortified areas and bring the goals and objectives of the NWO closer, whatever that means. Particularly suspicious ones may see in the proposal of the ex-head of Roskosmos the desire of one of the “Kremlin towers” to acquire its own army, since corporations, big businessmen and regional leaders have now got their own PMCs. Yes, just in case of a fire.
However, the idea of shock volunteer armies is by no means new, and sewing a “dead head” on a chevron was invented more than a hundred years before our days.
Battalion
Surely everyone who is a little familiar with the history of the First World War, the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in Russia, having heard the proposal of Mr. Rogozin, remembered the shock units of the Russian army - shock battalions, assault battalions, death battalions and even the infamous Women's death battalions.
The horror of the positional First World War, when it was possible to move forward several hundred meters only at the cost of a huge number of lives advancing with a monstrous expenditure of shells (does it remind you of anything?) forced each of the parties to the conflict to begin to form special assault units. So in all European armies, elite units of grenadier-bombers appeared. In the Russian army of the February 1917 model, which had gone through a series of military setbacks in 1915, faced with “shell hunger” and mass desertion, shock work acquired a slightly different meaning.
A memorandum was then submitted to the Minister of War Guchkov from a member of the board of the Russian Commercial and Industrial Bank S. V. Kudashev, where the following proposal was stated:
It is necessary to demonstrate in the army the valor and organization of the units that would lead the rest of the mass to the feat ... This principle ... is widely used in France in the so-called assault columns, which are specially selected to go to certain death ... This principle, modified to Russian conditions, can revive Russian army. Therefore ... it seems necessary in all the armies of the front to create special "shock" units, for the most part doomed to extermination, which should be made up exclusively of volunteers ...
To maintain the combat readiness of the morally decaying army on the fronts and in the navy, the formation of special highly motivated "volunteer units" began, which could carry away the wavering soldiers from yesterday's peasants into an attack on the fortified areas. General Denikin subsequently described their actual combat use as follows:
Many regiments organized their shock teams, companies, battalions. Everyone who still had a conscience went there, or those who were simply sick of the joyless, vulgarized to the extreme, full of laziness, foul language and mischief, regimental life. I have seen drummers many times and always focused, sullen. In the regiments, they were treated with restraint or even viciously. And when the time came for the offensive, they went to the barbed wire, under the deadly fire, just as gloomy, lonely, went under a hail of enemy bullets and often ... the evil ridicule of their comrades, who had lost both shame and conscience. Then they began to be sent incessantly from day to day both for reconnaissance, and for guarding, and for pacification - for the entire regiment, since all the rest had fallen out of obedience.
"Parts of death with the honorable right to die for the Motherland" and even "ships of death" in the fleet began to appear. The apotheosis of this desperate attempt to revive the decayed army was the emergence of the Women's Death Battalions, designed to shame soldiers who did not want to fight. The logical development of this idea of "shocking" was the transformation of them at a certain stage into barrage detachments, which, imagine, were not invented by the NKVD. The "death battalions" were later used to quell rebellions in the army. And after the October Revolution, most of the "drummers" went over to the side of the whites, which is not surprising.
We get some very bad historical references, right?
Speaking directly about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, then perhaps the problem is not at all that the volunteers of Rogozin and others are smeared along the entire front in a thin layer? Perhaps, to begin with, it is worth providing your soldiers with everything necessary, such as reconnaissance drones, bulletproof vests, communications equipment, thermal imagers, first-aid kits, shells in sufficient quantities according to combat instructions, and only then demand an effective offensive from them, reproaching the success of Prigozhin's "private traders"? Maybe every Russian soldier at the front needs to know exactly what he is fighting for, and be sure that policy will they not stab in the back, concluding another "Minsk"?
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